The basis of a novel bipolar transistor structure was proposed by Dr R. Aubusson of Middlesex Polytechnic in 1977. The novelty lies in replacing the conventional overlay transistor's P+ base grid with a refractory metal grid, in order (a) to lower the base resistance and (b) to autoregister the emitter. It was claimed that the linearity of the transistor would also be improved. A number of questions raised by this idea have been investigated, the methods and conclusions of which are presented here. Plausible structures, using the metal base grid, are proposed and compared with conventional structures. Some advantages are seen to be possible. The current understanding of distortion analysis applied to transistors is reviewed. The main ideas are presented in a unified manner and are extended to higher order. A number of the transistor's second order effects are analysed in a novel fashion. The metal base grid transistor is analysed and compared with conventional transistors, with favourable results. Practical aspects of fabricating the metal base grid transistor were investigated. A procedure for deposition has been determined and is presented here along with the film physical and electrical characteristics. Analysis of the tungsten-silicon interface shows the suitability of the metallization as a base grid. Suitable means of delineating the tungsten film have been assessed and a working procedure determined. Subsequent deposition of various insulators has been investigated and the problems associated with the readily oxidized tungsten film have been overcome. Formation of the emitter, requiring further high temperature processing, has been assessed in view of the limitations imposed by the preformed base metallization. In summary, it has been shown that the novel structure can be constructed and that significant performance improvement is to be expected, although a full realization was not possible within the resource constraints of the project.

abstract: Substation ground system insures safety of personnel, which deserves considerable attentions. Basic substation safety requirement quantities include ground grid resistance, mesh touch potential and step potential, moreover, optimal design of a substation ground system should include both safety concerns and ground grid construction cost. In the purpose of optimal designing the ground grid in the accurate and efficient way, an application package coded in MATLAB is developed and its core algorithm and main features are introduced in this work. To ensure accuracy and personnel safety, a two-layer soil model is applied instead of the uniform soil model in this research. Some soil model parameters are needed for the two-layer soil model, namely upper-layer resistivity, lower-layer resistivity and upper-layer thickness. Since the ground grid safety requirement is considered under the earth fault, the value of fault current and fault duration time are also needed. After all these parameters are obtained, a Resistance Matrix method is applied to calculate the mutual and self resistance between conductor segments on both the horizontal and vertical direction. By using a matrix equation of the relationship of mutual and self resistance and unit current of the conductor segments, the ground grid rise can be calculated. Green's functions are applied to calculate the earth potential at a certain point produced by horizontal or vertical line of current. Furthermore, the three basic ground grid safety requirement quantities: the mesh touch potential in the worst case point can be obtained from the earth potential and ground grid rise; the step potential can be obtained from two points' earth potential difference; the grid resistance can be obtained from ground grid rise and fault current. Finally, in order to achieve ground grid optimization problem more accurate and efficient, which includes the number of meshes in the horizontal grid and the number of vertical rods, a novel two-step hybrid genetic algorithm-pattern search (GA-PS) optimization method is developed. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used first to search for an approximate starting point, which is used by the Pattern Search (PS) algorithm to find the final optimal result. This developed application provides an optimal grid design meeting all safety constraints. In the cause of the accuracy of the application, the touch potential, step potential, ground potential rise and grid resistance are compared with these produced by the industry standard application WinIGS and some theoretical ground grid model. In summary, the developed application can solve the ground grid optimization problem with the accurate ground grid modeling method and a hybrid two-step optimization method. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Electrical Engineering 2014

Hybrid renewable energy systems (HRES) have proven to be a more stable and feasible source of energy than heir single source counterparts. The benefit of HRES is their ability to balance the stochastic behavior of wind and solar production. As result of this, they have been used as stand-alone systems with great success. Optimization studies in the field have shown optimum sizing of the components in the system to be a key element in order to increase feasibility. This paper focuses on the HRES impact on internal grid design and cost. The goal of the thesis is to create a mathematical function and graph on the internal grid design/cost relation for a virtual site with varying wind speed and solar irradiation. A secondary goal is to analyze how much Photovoltaics (PV) in Megawatt (MW) that can be connected to the internal grid post realization of the wind farm and to performed this analyze on the two specific case projects, Site A (17.25 MW) in Sweden and Site B (51.75 MW) in Italy. By utilizing a case study methodology, a mathematical model was created based on two case projects, both with potential to be a combined Wind-PV hybrid plants provided by the wind developer OX2. Identifiers for the two cases studied in this thesis where removed with respect to OX2’s ongoing projects. Hybrid renewable energy systems is a method of increasing the utilization of a regions RES, the system has an increase in overall power output compared to the single RES alternative. However, the internal grid cost was shown to be 3.85 % more expensive Site A and 5.3 % in Site B. This stood in direct correlation to the HRES in Site A using 8.6 % more cable for its internal grid and 29.7 % more in Site B, this is highly depending (depending on the location of the PV array). Furthermore, the case projects showed that the maximum PV to be connected post realization of the farm without major curtailment would be 11.5% of the wind farms rated power in the case of site A and 67.6 % in the case of Site B. Variations in wind speed and solar irradiation were shown to have some impact on grid cost. However, the results pointed out that grid cost in HRES is to a higher degree affected by total cable length in the internal grid than fluctuation in available energy sources. The extent of increase in cable length, the total grid investment cost rises up to 53.4 % for the two case projects.

<p>This dissertation shows how to use Constructal theory in order to design vascular structures with high cooling performance and mechanical strength. The vascular structures consist of grid, tree and hybrid (grid + tree) designs. The four chapters show how the cooling performance and mechanical strength can be increased by varying the vascular structure embedded in a plate for different models and boundary conditions. Chapter 2 shows that the fastest spreading or collecting flow (i.e. the steepest S curve) is discovered by allowing the tree architecture to morph freely. The angles between the lines of the invading tree architecture can be morphed (changed, selected) such that the overall flow proceeds along the fastest route, covering the greatest territory at any moment. Chapter 3 shows development of vascular designs that provide cooling and mechanical strength at the same time. This concept is illustrated with a circular plate vascularized with embedded channels. Chapter 4 shows how vascular design controls the cooling and mechanical performance of a solid slab heated uniformly and loaded with uniform pressure. Chapter 5 shows that a plate heated by a randomly moving beam can be cooled effectively by fluid that flows through a vasculature of channels embedded in the plate. In sum, constructal design governs the evolution of flow structures that offer flow access and mechanical strength at the same time.</p> / Dissertation

Power has become an important design closure parameter in today’s ultra low submicron digital designs. The impact of the increase in power is multi-discipline to researchers ranging from power supply design, power converters or voltage regulators design, system, board and package thermal analysis, power grid design and signal integrity analysis to minimizing power itself. This work focuses on challenges arising due to increase in power to power grid design and analysis. Challenges arising due to lower geometries and higher power are very well researched topics and there is still lot of scope to continue work. Traditionally, designs go through average IR drop analysis. Average IR drop analysis is highly dependent on current dissipation estimation. This work proposes a vector less probabilistic toggle estimation which is extension of one of the approaches proposed in literature. We have further used toggles computed using this approach to estimate power of ISCAS89 benchmark circuits. This provides insight into quality of toggles being generated. Power Estimation work is further extended to comprehend with various state of the art methodologies available i.e. spice based power estimation, logic simulation based power estimation, commercially available tool comparisons etc. We finally arrived at optimum flow recommendation which can be used as per design need and schedule. Today’s design complexity – high frequencies, high logic densities and multiple level clock and power gating - has forced design community to look beyond average IR drop. High rate of switching activities induce power supply fluctuations to cells in design which is known as instantaneous IR drop. However, there is no good analysis methodology in place to analyze this phenomenon. Ad hoc decoupling planning and on chip intrinsic decoupling capacitance helps to contain this noise but there is no guarantee. This work also applies average toggle computation approach to compute instantaneous IR drop analysis for designs. Instantaneous IR drop is also known as dynamic IR drop or power supply noise. We are proposing cell characterization methodology for standard cells. This data is used to build power grid model of the design. Finally, the power network is solved to compute instantaneous IR drop. Leakage Power Minimization has forced design teams to do complex power gating – multilevel MTCMOS usage in Power Grid. This puts additonal analysis challenge for Power Grid in terms of ON/OFF sequencing and noise injection due to it. This work explains the state of art here and highlights some of the issues and trade offs using MTCMOS logic. It further suggests a simple approach to quickly access the impact of MTCMOS gates in Power Grid in terms of peak currents and IR drop. Alternatively, the approach suggested also helps in MTCMOS gate optimization. Early leakage optimization overhead can be computed using this approach.